• Canada’s independent watchdog for overseas human rights complaints against Canadian companies has been leaderless since May 2025, leaving at least 24 active cases effectively stalled.

• Communities in the Dominican Republic, Namibia, Pakistan and elsewhere say delays have left them without a meaningful avenue to seek accountability for alleged environmental and human rights harms linked to Canadian mining and energy projects.

• Critics argue the office of the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) was already limited by weak investigative powers, and the year-long vacancy has further undermined confidence in the mechanism.

• The leadership gap comes as Canada promotes mining investment tied to growing demand for critical minerals. The vacancy is prompting renewed calls from advocates, former officials and the United Nations for the office to be strengthened and a new ombudsperson appointed urgently

When staff answer the call of nature at the European Space Agency’s headquarters in Paris, their urine is not simply flushed away – it is turned into something much more useful. While urine-diverting toilets are often associated with smelly festival loos, there is nothing bohemian about recycling nutrients from human pee, said David de Chambrier, the chief executive of VunaNexus.

The process isn’t so different from recovering minerals in used electronics.

“Urine is a very concentrated resource. This is not a hippy thing to do; we are recycling minerals,” he said. Similarly to batteries, which should not be thrown in the bin to be recycled, “separating the urine at the source makes its treatment way easier”.

Special toilets that look like normal facilities send the separated liquid, without diluting it with water, down a piping system into a small treatment plant in the basement of the building.

There, the urine goes through a series of tanks that remove micropollutants, such as antibiotics, and concentrate valuable nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus that are essential for plant growth. The liquid is then pasteurised at 90C, killing any potential viruses and other pathogens. The distilled water is separated and reinjected into the flushing system before a liquid fertiliser called Aurin comes out on the other side.

A three-month national investigation by Beyond Plastics found that not a single tracked Starbucks cold-beverage cup ended up at a recycling facility — even when the cups were placed in clearly marked recycling bins inside Starbucks stores. As detailed in the new report, titled “Tracking Starbucks’ Deceptive Recyclability Claims,” the findings directly contradict Starbucks’ recent public claims that its single-use polypropylene (No. 5 plastic) cold cups are “widely recyclable.”

The EJAtlas is a work in progress. Newly documented cases and information are continuously added to the platform. However, many are still undocumented and new ones arise. Please note that the absence of data does not indicate the absence of conflict.

A new World Meteorological Organization report estimated 13,000 annual heat-related deaths across 17 countries in the region.

The report: State of the Climate in Latin America and the Caribbean 2025

Scientists said this week that a developing El Niño is likely to amplify heatwaves, droughts and floods this year, but warned that the long-term warming caused by burning fossil fuels remains the main driver of climate extremes.

El Niño is the warm phase of a semi-regular temperature oscillation in the tropical Pacific Ocean, during which massive amounts of heat stored in the ocean are released into the atmosphere, temporarily raising the average annual global surface temperature by as much as 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

During an online briefing this week, researchers said that the consequences of a moderate or strong El Niño today are more damaging than those of similar events just a few decades ago because the entire global climate system is now substantially warmer.

If the projected El Niño emerges on top of that warmer climate, there is a “serious risk of unprecedented weather extremes” that would not have happened during similar historical El Niños, said Fredi Otto, a professor in climate science at Imperial College London and a lead researcher with World Weather Attribution, a research group assessing how global warming affects climate extremes.

"The campaign to restore the Everglades has received a boost with completion of a key project that returns the flow of water to 55,000 acres that had once been drained for development. Experts see it as a major step forward in bringing back South Florida’s River of Grass."

Malé is one of the world’s most overcrowded cities, but it faces double pressure. As well as a growing population, the capital of the Maldives is also threatened by rising sea levels. Owing to climate breakdown, its living space is shrinking.

So the justification for a land reclamation project seemed clear. Take sand from elsewhere in the archipelago and use it to build up the land available for Malé’s people. What could go wrong? After all, it’s only sand, right?

Around the world, urban development and industry is using sand at a rate of 50bn tonnes a year, a figure that is expected to grow. But a new UN report warns that sand is being extracted faster than it can be replenished, and that this is threatening livelihoods, ecosystems and the very structure of the natural world.

Pascal Peduzzi, the director of the Unep global resource information database Geneva, which prepared the report, said: “Sand is sometimes referred to as the unrecognised hero of development, but its essential role in sustaining the natural services on which we depend is even more overlooked. Sand is our first line of defence against sea level rise, storm surges, and salination of coastal aquifers – all hazards exacerbated by climate change.”

High above the jagged peaks of California’s Sierra Nevada, the view from the cockpit is breathtaking. At first glance, the mountains appear draped in a pristine white blanket. But as the flight crew gears up for a high-stakes mission, the sensors onboard this specialized aircraft prove that looks can be deceiving.

“This is a distinct dry year,” says Tom Painter, CEO of Airborne Snow Observatories.

Painter, who developed this technology at Nasa, isn’t relying on a visual inspection. His plane uses Lidar, or rapid pulses of laser light, to calculate snow depth with surgical precision. “The Lidar sprays out about 800,000 pulses per second,” he explains. The result is a 3D map of snow depth accurate to within 3cm. The technology also helps determine how much water is stored in the snowpack.

In the US west, where mountain ranges act as “frozen reservoirs”, state water managers rely on this data as a survival guide. It helps them plan for exactly how much water will eventually reach the faucets of millions of people and the critical farm fields that feed the nation.

This year, the data is sounding an alarm.

When Leonore Gewessler hops on the underground trains and street-level trams that run like clockwork across the breadth of Vienna, she appreciates the ease, affordability and time she “gets as a present” instead of idling in traffic. But Austria’s former climate and transport minister is also aware that cars still dominate the capital’s streets. She says good public transport is just the “precondition” to changing how people move around the city.

Vienna’s network of trains, trams and buses have long been the envy of other European cities – let alone car-centric North American ones – but automobiles are still used for a quarter of journeys. In other capitals famed for world-class public transport, such as London, Paris and Prague, even higher use of cars has frustrated doctors and campaigners demanding cleaner air and safer streets.

Transport scientists suggest it shows the limits of what can be achieved by encouraging clean forms of transport without discouraging polluting ones.

Beyond a certain threshold, further improvements to one mode of transport become “a sort of zero-sum game”, according to Giulio Mattioli, a researcher at the Technical University of Dortmund.

You’ve no doubt heard some variation of the claim that “AI” will somehow solve the climate crisis. You’ve also probably heard the warnings: that the rapid expansion of all the data centres needed to deploy more of this technology comes with considerable environmental costs. There’s a widening rift, with competing voices making wildly different arguments about the tech’s climate impacts.

Is it all just hot air? Is anyone backing up their claims with data? To try and get some answers, independent climate analyst Ketan Joshi recently published the first report of its kind. In it, he interrogates the argument that “AI” will have net-positive benefits for the climate. Supported by a consortium of environmental organisations — including Stand.earth, Beyond Fossil Fuels, and Climate Action Against Disinformation, among others — he looked into the green claims companies make about “AI.” He checked the footnotes and scoured the available data to try and come to some conclusions.

In the end, Joshi found zero verifiable evidence that the new wave of consumer generative “AI” was reducing emissions in any way, despite what the Big Tech companies would have you believe.

Yes, some forms of “AI” do have positive environmental benefits, as we get into in the conversation that follows. But Joshi found that those benefits were being misattributed to generative “AI” systems like ChatGPT, which consume up to 13 times more energy than the lower-energy technologies actually delivering the climate gains.

Critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel are becoming the “oil of the 21st century” as the scramble for precious metals deepens poverty and creates public health crises in some of the world’s most vulnerable communities, a report by the UN’s water thinktank has found.

The investigation by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) concluded that the growing demand for lithium, cobalt and nickel used in batteries and microchips is draining water supplies, eroding agriculture and exposing communities to toxic heavy metals.

An estimated 456bn litres of water were used to extract 240,000 tonnes of lithium in 2024, the researchers found, with little of the financial benefit or technological advances from the green energy transition or AI boom reaching the affected communities.

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From toxic smoke and oil spills to rising emissions, poisoned soil, and damaged ecosystems, war can reshape the environment long after the fighting stops.

War had already darkened Tehran’s skies by March 8. When rain began to fall, residents said it was thick, foul-smelling and dark in color. Some described it as black rain, coating streets, rooftops, and cars in sootlike residue.

That night, Israel had struck more than 30 oil facilities in Iran. The scale of the attacks and the fires that followed were so significant that US officials later questioned their strategic rationale.

But the damage has not stopped there. From smoke over Fujairah and oil risks in Gulf waters to burned farmland and contamination fears in southern Lebanon, the environmental toll of conflict is spreading across the wider region. [...]

The Pacific heat pulse is temporary, but scientists warn that its climate impacts are not.

The study concluded that “super El Niños” are not just passing weather events, but more like climate shocks that can push parts of the Earth system into new states,

There are only three super El Niños on record: in 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16.

This study is open access and was published on December 12, 2025

More than 50 nations are attending a world-first conference on phasing out fossil fuels in Colombia next week as the Iran war underscores how dependent countries remain on planet-heating coal, oil and gas.

The gathering was born out of frustration with consensus-based United Nations climate talks, where efforts to negotiate a fossil fuel exit strategy have stalled.

Major fossil fuel producing nations Australia, Canada and Norway are expected along with developing oil giants Angola, Mexico and Brazil and coal-reliant emerging markets Turkey and Vietnam.

However the world's biggest coal, oil and gas producers -- notably the United States, China, Saudi Arabia and Russia -- are skipping the event.

Tensions boiled over at COP30 in Brazil in November when nations could not even agree to include an explicit reference to fossil fuels in the final deal.

Extreme heat is threatening the world’s food systems, with farmers unable to work outside, livestock experiencing stress and crop yields falling, putting the livelihoods of more than a billion people in peril, the UN has warned.

Experts said food supply in some areas was being “pushed to the brink” by increasingly common and severe heatwaves, on land and at sea, in a major report written jointly by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Farmers could find it impossible to work safely for as many as 250 days of the year – more than two-thirds of the time – in already hot regions including much of India and south Asia, tropical sub-Saharan Africa and swathes of Central and South America.

Livestock are already experiencing an increase in mortality rates, as heat stress begins for common species at about 25C. Extreme heat reduces yields from dairy cows and cuts the fat and protein content of milk. Pigs and chickens are unable to sweat and, as temperatures rise, face digestive tract breakdowns, organ failure and cardiovascular shock.

Yields begin to decline at temperatures above 30C for most agricultural crops, with damage including weakened cell walls and the production of toxins. The yields of maize in some areas have declined by about 10%. Wheat has fallen by nearly as much, and is projected to decline further as temperatures rise to more than 1.5C above preindustrial levels.

tl;dr: Billionaire control over the media.

The poor and middle pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers – and the ultra-rich pay politicians. It’s not an original remark, but it bears repeating until everyone has heard it. The more money billionaires accumulate, the greater their control of the political system – which means they pay less tax, which means they accumulate more, which means their control intensifies.

They reshape the world to suit their demands. One of the symptoms of the pathology known as “billionaire brain” is an inability to see beyond their own short-term gain. They would sack the planet for a few more stones on the pointless mountain of wealth. And we can see it happening. Last week delivered the biggest news of the year so far, perhaps the biggest news of the century. But partly because billionaires own most of the media, most people never heard it. We might find ourselves committed to a civilisation-ending event before we even learn that such a thing is possible.

The news is that the state of a crucial oceanic circulation system has been reassessed by scientists. Some now believe that, as a result of climate breakdown changing the temperature and salinity of seawater, it is more likely than not to collapse. This system – known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) – delivers heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic. Recent research suggests that if it shuts down, it could cause both a massive drop in average winter temperatures in northern Europe and drastic changes in the Amazon’s water cycles. This could help tip the rainforest into cascading collapse and trigger further disaster.

The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system and was already known to be at its weakest for 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis. Scientists spotted warning signs of a tipping point in 2021 and know that the Amoc has collapsed in the Earth’s past.

Climate scientists use dozens of different computer models to assess the future climate. However, for the complex Amoc system, these produce widely varying results, ranging from some that indicate no further slowdown by 2100 to those suggesting a huge deceleration of about 65%, even when carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning are gradually cut to net zero.

The research combined real-world ocean observations with the models to determine the most reliable, and this hugely reduced the spread of uncertainty. They found an estimated slowdown of 42% to 58% in 2100, a level almost certain to end in collapse.

archive article: https://archive.is/ZDeUd